HEAVY METAL DRAGONS

'Lovehunter' - Whitesnake (Chris Achilleos)

Back in those far-off, antediluvian times that marked my youth and when I first got into motorbikes and tattoos, I was also a bit of a head-banger – although I won't horrify you by posting photos of me with long hair! However, I did have quite a collection of hard rock and heavy metal (HM) records, some of which I still retain.

While chatting recently with a friend from that period in my life and who had shared my enthusiasm for this genre of rock music, we reminisced about the spectacular artwork featured on the covers of some of the classic albums, and I happened to mention one of my all-time favourite examples. Namely, the stunning artwork by Chris Achilleos for 'Lovehunter', British band Whitesnake's second studio album, released in 1979, which depicts a decidedly cryptozoological serpent dragon with long curved horns.

Another favourite of mine that I mentioned was the ornate Eastern dragon depicted on the title single from Bruce Dickinson's debut solo album 'Tattooed Millionaire', released in 1990, and also on a 'Tattooed Millionaire' t-shirt that I had long since worn out due to relentless wearing!

'Tattooed Millionaire' (single) - Bruce Dickinson

As a result, the conversation then veered into reflecting upon just how popular the dragon remains as a subject referred to directly or at least metaphorically in HM song titles. Intrigued, I have carried out some research into this, and here is a representative list of examples from bands all around the globe:

'Killing the Dragon' - Dio

'Magic Dragon', from German thrash metal band Sodom's third album 'Agent Orange' (released in 1989); 'Ride the Dragon', from American heavy metal band Manowar's seventh album 'The Triumph of Steel' (1992); 'The Dragon Lies Bleeding', from Swedish power metal band HammerFall's debut album 'Glory to the Brave' (1997); 'In the Dragon's Den', from American progressive metal band Symphony X's fourth studio album 'Twilight in Olympus' (1998); 'The Dragon's Lair', from Swedish heavy metal band Crystal Eyes' debut album 'World of Black and Silver' (1999); 'Black Dragon', from Italian symphonic power metal songwriter Luca Turilli's solo album 'King of the Nordic Twilight' (1999); 'The River Dragon Has Come', from American heavy metal band Nevermore's fourth studio album 'Dead Heart, in a Dead World' (2000); 'Killing the Dragon', the title track from American heavy metal band Dio's ninth studio album (2002); 'Heart of a Dragon', from English power metal band DragonForce's debut album 'Valley of the Damned (2003); 'Dragon Reborn', from Australian power metal band Black Majesty's second album 'Live Company' (2005); 'Where Dragons Dwell', from French heavy metal band Gojira's third studio album 'From Mars to Sirius' (2005); 'Dragonheart', from Danish power metal band Iron Fire's fourth full-length album 'Blade of Triumph' (2007); 'Chasing the Dragon', from Dutch symphonic metal band Epica's fourth album 'The Divine Conspiracy' (2008); and 'Daltor the Dragonhunter', from Italian symphonic power metal band Ancient Bards' album 'The Alliance of the Kings' (2010).

'Emerald Sword' (single) - Rhapsody of Fire

Other noteworthy examples include 'Tears of the Dragon', a critically-lauded, highly-melodic track from Iron Maiden's once-and-future front man Bruce Dickinson's second solo album 'Balls to Picasso' (1994); 'The Consummate Dragon', inspired by Smaug in Tolkien's The Hobbit, from American hardcore punk band Shai Hulud's second studio album 'That Within Blood Ill-Tempered' (2003); 'Dragon', from German heavy/power metal band Grave Digger's eleventh studio album 'Rheingold' (2003 – inspired by Richard Wagner's classical 'Ring Cycle'); and the various dragon songs contained in Italian symphonic power metal band Rhapsody of Fire's five-album 'Emerald Sword Saga' (1997-2004), inspired by the realms of high fantasy from the 'swords and sorcery' literary genre.

'The Dragon' - Vangelis (Terry Oakes)

Also deserving of inclusion here is 'The Dragon', appearing on Vangelis's unofficial studio album of the same title released in 1978, whose cover featured a stunning sea dragon depicted by Terry Oakes.

If there are any notable omissions, I'd welcome details.

'Symphony of Enchanted Lands' - Rhapsody of Fire

COINCIDENCE OR COMMONPLACE? FROM REVELATION TO REACTOR

Tapestry commissioned by Louis, Duke of Anjou, of the third angel and wormwood

To some, coincidences are nothing but random incidents impinging upon one another merely by chance, and therefore lacking any significance or meaning. To others, they are abruptly-revealed links within a grand chain of recognition still to be forged in its entirety within the human mind. What do you think?

Consider the following example, which I came upon yesterday while browsing through Sir Alec Guinness's A Commonplace Book (2001) - a fascinating collection of eclectica and esoterica drawn from countless sources and jotted down by this celebrated British actor over the years in a couple of exercise books but not collated in published form until a year after his death - and judge for yourself.

In the New Testament of the Holy Bible, the following verses (10 and 11) can be found in Chapter 8 of the Book of the Revelation of St John the Divine:

"And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;

"And the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter."

Was this truly a revelation of what would be at the end of the world, or, rather, a prophecy regarding an event of much closer proximity in time, specifically 26 April 1986?

I only ask because it just so happens that in Russo-Ukrainian, the word for wormwood is...Chernobyl.



Chernobyl disaster (Wikipedia)



Just a coincidence...?

THE DOVER DEMON AND INTERNATIONAL OBSCURA DAY

Sketch by eyewitness Bill Bartlett of the Dover demon, as featured in various newspapers during 1977 (Bill Bartlett-Wikipedia)


Here's a very interesting email that I've received from Heather at Atlas Obscura:

"Wanted to let you know about the third annual “International Obscura Day”, (www.obscuraday.com), a day of unusual local explorations, all over the world, presented by Atlas Obscura, an online travel guide to curious and unusual places. On April 28th, Loren Coleman, from the the International Cryptozoology Museum, will be giving a lecture [click here for details] to mark the 35 anniversary of the Dover Demon investigation."

"Thought you and your readers would be interested in it."

Thanks, Heather, for bringing this to my attention!

In case there are readers who are unfamiliar with the Dover demon, here is what I wrote about this intriguing entity in my book The Unexplained:


The last thing that 17-year-old Bill Bartlett expected to see when driving with two friends through Dover, Massachusetts, at around 10.30 pm on 21 April 1977 was a creature from another dimension. Yet that is what he may have done, at least in the opinion of some investigators - and judging from Bill's description of what he saw, they could have a point!

Driving along, his car's headlights suddenly illuminated a peculiar entity picking its way along a stone wall at the side of the road. As can be seen from the pencil sketch that Bill later prepared, which is reproduced here [see illustration opening this Eclectarium blog post], the creature had a disproportionately large head, shaped like a water melon, with two big, protruding eyes that glowed orange, but it did not seem to have a mouth, nose, or ears. Its body was small, its neck and limbs were long and thin, and its fingers and toes were slender and supple. The creature appeared to be hairless, but its peach-coloured skin was rough in texture. It stood 3-4 ft high, and was observed only by Bill (his two friends were not looking in the right direction to see it).

Unknown to Bill, however, his strange sighting would soon be substantiated by an entirely independent eyewitness. Less than two hours later, 15-year-old John Baxter was walking home little more than a mile from the locality of Bill's encounter when he saw a strange figure coming towards him. After receiving no reply when he called out to it, John paused, and as he did so the figure ran away down a gully. John chased after it, and when he was about 30 ft away, he could see it clearly, standing upright on its hind legs and gripping the trunk of a tree. When he spied its brightly glowing eyes in an otherwise featureless face staring at him, however, John decided to let caution supersede curiosity, and he walked briskly back to the road. Once he reached home, he too sketched the creature, and as can be seen here, his wholly independent drawing corresponds very closely indeed with Bill's.

At around midnight on 22 April, what Fortean researcher Loren Coleman would subsequently dub 'the Dover demon' was seen again, this time by 15-year-old Abby Brabham while being driven home by Will Taintor, 18, who only spied it very briefly. Abby's description matched those of Bill and John in every respect except one - when she observed it, its eyes were glowing green, not orange. And thus ended the curious case of the Dover demon - for it has never been reported again, and has never been satisfactorily identified.

If the descriptions of it are accurate, and they are certainly very consistent, the Dover demon does not resemble any species known to science, either from North America or elsewhere. It may not, however, be entirely unknown. The Cree Indians of eastern Canada speak of a mysterious race of pygmy entities called the Mannegishi, who delight in playing tricks upon travellers. According to the Cree, the Mannegishi have round heads, long thin legs, arms with six fingers on each hand, and they live between rocks in the rapids. Excluding the finger count discrepancy, this description is reminiscent of the Dover demon.

SEA NYMPHS AND STEAM DEVILS

Triton and a nereid (Max Klinger, 1895)

In his compilation volume Tornados, Dark Days, Anomalous Precipitation, and Related Weather Phenomena (1983), veteran anomalies chronicler William R. Corliss defined steam devils as: "Long fingers or columns of vapor rising from a water surface and swirling upward into the cloud deck". Resulting from thermal convection when the water is much warmer than the air, and moulded into shape by air currents, steam devils can sometimes occur in large arrays and yield geometrical patterns, but the reason for their remarkable stability is still a mystery.

A classic observation of steam devils, which took place at New York's Canandaigua Lake, was recorded on 4 January 1912 in Scientific American by James S. Lee:

"The surface of the lake was covered by vapor caused by the difference in temperature between the cold air and the comparatively warm water. This vapor, white mist, gathered in spots in masses rising higher than the surrounding mist. As these masses of vapor reached a height of some twenty feet they appeared to take on a rotary motion and formed themselves into columns slowly rising until their apexes met the low-lying clouds, where they spread out in a funnel shape exactly as do water spouts. The columns varied from a foot to possibly ten feet in diameter; some of them ascending in a straight line and others bent into fantastic curves by the action of the wind. I saw a great number of these mist whirls during a drive of some two hours, covering a distance of ten miles along the lake shore, and as they formed and drifted slowly across the water, illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, they were a beautiful and to me a unique spectacle."

In 1932, Science News Letter, another American periodical, published a report of a recent encounter with steam devils made by Professor Johannes Walther while voyaging in the waters around Greece during high waves and an impending snowstorm:

"The cold air striking the warm water caused numerous columns of white vapor to rise over the foamy caps of the waves. They hovered momentarily, then were caught up whirling by the wind, and as they spun away through the air it did not require any violent stretch of the imagination to see them as feminine figures dancing in filmy draperies."

Faced with this magical scene, Walther proffered a very novel hypothesis, linking these enthralling meteorological creations with a certain company of maritime maidens from classical Greek mythology. He speculated that perhaps in ancient times, sightings by Greek sailors of diaphanous steam devils hovering at the surface of the sea may have given rise to legends of the Nereids. These beautiful sea nymphs were the fifty daughters of Nereus - an early thalassic shapeshifting deity who lived in a palace beneath the Aegean Sea - and would dance upon the waves, assisting endangered sailors.

Nereid riding a sea-bull

I have not seen any subsequent commentary relating to this intriguing if somewhat poetic notion. Nevertheless, I have little doubt that if unexpectedly confronted by the type of surrealistic spectacle documented here, in bygone ages the human imagination may indeed have conferred some supernatural, divine identity upon the swirling steam devils - especially in a land like ancient Greece, where it was widely believed that every facet of nature was controlled or inhabited by its own designated deities. From such beliefs were legends born.

BEWARE THE BASILISK, O KNIGHT!

Back in medieval times, the basilisk was one of the most feared beasts that never existed. This fictitious creature was widely if erroneously believed to be real - a greatly-dreaded monster originally likened to a modest-sized snake or short-limbed lizard, but bearing a regal crown upon its head, and able to move forward with much of its body held erect, yet so toxic that the merest glance from its radiant eyes brought instant death to those who beheld it, the merest waft of its noxious breath shrivelled every living thing for miles around, and the merest dribble of venom from its fanged jaws poisoned for untold ages to come the very dust of the earth upon which it fell.

During the course of countless retellings of legends and lore concerning this reptilian horror down through the generations, its appearance became conflated with that of another imaginary creature, the cockatrice, sequestering from this latter monstrosity its rooster-like coxcomb, wattles and beak, a pair of sturdy spurred legs, and an ear-splitting crowing cry. Only a weasel or the rue plant (see image below) could combat the basilisk's lethal powers, and it left terror and destruction in its virulent wake.


All in all, therefore, this was hardly a creature that readily elicited sympathy, and yet...

The January 1997 issue of a wonderful magazine called The Dragon Chronicle contained an outstanding short story entitled 'The Caprice', written by my old friend and cryptozoology colleague Richard Freeman, which revealed a very different, surprising side to the feared and hated basilisk, and which so captivated me when I read it that I've remembered it vividly ever since.

So now, with Richard's kind permission, I have pleasure in reprinting 'The Caprice', which I hope that you will enjoy as much as I did when I first read it, and still do today.


THE CAPRICE - by Richard Freeman

What would one call a creature that devoured colour? A chromatavore perhaps? It seemed to Edgar that his quarry had the ability to drain away more than just life. For six miles now all he had seen was varying shades of grey. The dead grass, the withered husks of trees and the twisted rocks. His mount had screamed and foamed at the edge of the desolation. Rearing up in wild eyed panic. So he left it and continued on foot.

He soon cast off the heavy armour, it would afford him little protection against his foe. He carried no sword or spear, the necromancer had warned him of that folly, "so bloated with venom is this serpent that, should a mounted man strike it down with a lance, the poison would travel up the weapon killing both man and horse."

Edgar shuddered, but from the memory of he who had sent him on this errand, rather than from the monster's power. He feared Silas Rasp more than the thing at the heart of the desolation. Barely five feet tall his bald head was unnaturally round and chubby. His oily skin was porcelain smooth and taken with his pot belly and pudgy fingers gave him the appearance of an outsized baby.

"One glance is death," he had hissed, fat tongue protruding toad-like through rubbery lips. "Yet it is such a rare and magical beast that its body parts have, shall we say, certain properties."

His eyes like pips of jet with a hunger it was disquieting to see, "About its wattled neck sprout green feathers. Spells committed to parchment with a quill made from these feathers increase ten fold in potency. Slay the serpent and pluck it like a goose."

So it was not to save the beleaguered land he had sallied forth. Rather in answer to the pull of the gold that glittered in Rasp's sweaty palms.

The cadavers of a man and a mule lay at the road side. They shared the same rigid horror on their glazed eyes. Ugly swarms of blow flies were contesting ownership of the corpses. Edgar found the insects oddly reassuring, they were the only living things he had seen in the desolation. As he travelled further, the bodies grew more in number - a band of gypsies, a travelling merchant, a wandering monk and a hedgerow apothecary. Warriors too, all fiercely armed, all dead. He was nearing the lair.

He found himself at a ruined chapel, stained glass broken, doors long rotted and gaping into darkness. He slipped the cloth cover from his shield and crept closer. Something moved; from the chapel came a rustle like dead leaves.

"Stay as you are, come no closer and down your blade," the voice sounded neither reptilian nor evil; merely old.

"The scourge speaks," breathed Edgar.

"The scourge is fluent in fifteen languages," came the reply. "I have lived longer than you can imagine."

"And now it is your day to die, abomination."

"Mayhap, but I would talk with you first," it said. "It has been many moons since I spoke with a sentient being."

"No, I will have none of your tricks, basilisk. "

"So you know my name."

"And your deeds."

"And you are not curious about the nature of these deeds, and why I must kill wantonly."

"You sound as if you have no choice, demon. "

"I have none, and don't confound me with your Christian bugbears. I am a caprice, a whim of a nature that is mad, blind, cruel, or all three."

"Riddles too, you wag your forked tongue well, serpent." But by now Edgar was fascinated. A loquacious cockatrice, no one had heard of such a thing in all of Christendom. "Riddle on, gorgon-seed."

"When a hen grows old, she sometimes apes her opposite gender, growing spurs and crowing. Should one of these 'cock-hens' lay an egg at the time of the dog-star, and should said egg be hatched by a toad or snake, one of my kind is born. The doubly cursed. Be glad these events conspire only rarely and we number so few."

"You said doubly cursed?"

"Aye, we are twice damned. The curse of immortality and the curse of our glance."

"Immortality is a curse?"

"Callow youth, what know you of immortality, of the grinding tedium, the blandness and the pain?"

"Pain?"

"Pain, agony, torment beyond your feeble mayfly imagining." The basilisk's voice dropped now, almost to a whisper. "The pain is we cannot look upon another living creature without killing it. Imagine eternity of solitude and death, we cannot even look upon one of our own kind. Nothing but greyness forever and ever, even grass withers and flowers die beneath our gaze. I am a living prison to myself, hated, feared and bored by all creation. That is what it is to be a caprice."

The basilisk slipped slowly from the shadows. It seemed that all the stolen colours from the desolation resided within its scaled body. It was cobalt blue save for the metallic green feathers about its neck, the yellow beak, and its comb and wattle the colour of arterial blood. The eyes swivelled independently like those of a chameleon, their lids were slowly opening.

Edgar swung his shield of highly polished bronze and turned his head away. It was a full twenty minutes before he dared lower it again. Rasp had been correct, the basilisk's gaze was as lethal to itself as it was to any other creature. He walked over to the prone reptile. It was not the vast serpent of his imagining, but a lizard barely three feet in length. As he bent to pluck its ruff with the tongs Rasp had given him, he noticed something. Upon the basilisk's hooked beak, there was a hint of a relieved smile.


This short story first appeared in The Dragon Chronicle, no. 9 (January 1997): 29-30.

A new fiction anthology by Richard has just been published – Green, Unpleasant Land: Eighteen Tales of British Horror (CFZ Press: Bideford, 2012), available from Amazon.co.uk (click here) and all good bookstores. So be sure to check it out!

BRING ME THE HEAD OF OZYMANDIAS!

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Percy Bysshe Shelley – ‘Ozymandias’


Had I not become a zoologist, I may well have sought a career in archaeology, as I have always been fascinated with ancient civilisations and the many extraordinary monuments, edifices, and other spectacular creations that once existed in those bygone realms - of which the following example is a particular favourite of mine

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s celebrated poem ‘Ozymandias’ (quoted above in full) is a succinct but extraordinarily powerful evocation of the folly of human vanity, and the stark image of an immense wrecked statue encompassed by an empty wasteland of desert sand as conjured forth by Shelley’s strangely compelling lines has fascinated me ever since I first read them many years ago.

It was only during my visit to Egypt’s West Bank in January 2006, however, that I discovered to my surprise and delight that Ozymandias, and his giant stone head, were much more than mere figments of a poet’s imagination.

Ramesses II statue at Abu Simbel, Egypt (Hajor/Wikipedia)

Ruling for 66 years and 2 months during the 13th Century BC, when ancient Egypt had attained the very zenith of its power and splendour, Pharaoh Ramesses II was possibly the most celebrated, and wealthiest, of all of this great country’s ancient rulers, and he used his vast riches to create an unparalleled array of monuments glorifying his existence. None was more spectacular, however, than his memorial (mortuary) temple, located in Thebes on the West Bank, across the River Nile from present-day Luxor. It was originally known as “The House of Millions of Years of Usermaatra-Setepenra That Unites With Thebes-The-City in the Domain of Amon”, but following his visit to its ruins in 1829, French archaeologist Jean-François Champollion coined a rather more concise yet no less fitting name for it – the Ramesseum.

Yet despite being dubbed the House of Millions of Years, in reality this architectural wonder lasted for a far shorter span of time, on account of its location. Tragically, it had been erected at the very edge of the Nile floodplain, and so its foundations were inexorably undermined by this mighty river’s annual inundation, as well as by neglect and desecration in later ages. Eventually, together with the gargantuan statues that it contained, Ramesses II’s magnificent temple collapsed, and in time became largely buried, with only scattered ruins to remind a modern world of its long-bygone glory.

The surviving head and shoulder of the Ozymandias Colossus (Steve F.E. Cameron/Wikipedia)

Among its now-fallen statues was an immense stone giant dubbed the Ozymandias Colossus, which weighed over 900 tons and formerly stood as tall as Memnon’s twin counterparts documented earlier in this chapter. Today, however, only its massive head, hands, and feet remain. These shattered relics, the pathetic remnants of Ramesses II’s most grandiose attempt at self-glorification, are what inspired Shelley’s famous sonnet, though the “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” were his own invention, as no such relics exist here today.


As for the memorable name, Ozymandias, this was actually a mis-transliteration from Egyptian into Greek - by 1st-Century-BC writer Diodorus of Sicily - of the first part of Ramesses II’s throne name, Usermaatra Setepenra. This appears as a cartouche on the statue’s shoulder, and can still be seen today as shown in Steve Cameron's photograph included earlier here.

Ozymandias (panthalassa3d.livejournal.com/)


This Eclectarium blog post is excerpted from my book Dr Shuker's Casebook (CFZ Press: Bideford, 2008)

GROW YOUR OWN HOMUNCULUS

Creating a homunculus via alchemy

Even today, the alchemists of medieval times remain famous for their supposed (but unconfirmed) ability to transmute base metals into gold, using the fabled philosopher's stone. Less well-remembered, yet even more controversial, is their alleged artificial creation of tiny living humanoids - known as homunculi. Some references to homunculi in alchemical texts featured them as symbolic rather than literal. For instance, the fabled Philosopher's Stone is sometimes considered to be a homunculus, with its creation no less than the representation of the Great Work (Magnum Opus) process, merely described in a different way.

A symbolic homunculus, depicted in The Pretiosissimum Donum Dei ('The Most Precious Gift of God'), an important 15th-Century alchemical work by Georgius Aurach de Argentina

In September 1994, however, Paul Thompson published an engrossing review of this largely-forgotten arcane subject in America's Fate Magazine that contained some remarkable revelations regarding the alleged creation of living homunculi, and which inspired my own ongoing fascination with this subject.

Alchemists claimed that the culture medium required for the growth of homunculi contained several biological fluids such as sputum or egg-white, and sometimes inorganic fluids like dew, but the two substances most commonly cited as essential were human blood and semen - both of which are widely believed in primitive or non-scientific societies to harbour the vital essence of life. Also required was horse manure, whose heat-releasing properties were utilised to incubate the medium.

Bearing in mind that all of the above ingredients are readily obtainable, why was the production of homunculi a skill restricted to alchemists? The answer is that the recipes always seemed to contain one vital ingredient that was exceptionally complex and difficult to prepare.

Paracelsus, painted by Quentin Massys

For example, in the homunculus recipe contained within the treatise De Natura Rerum, written by 16th-Century Swiss scholar and alchemist Theophrastus Paracelsus (aka Philippus von Hohenheim), 'the arcanum of human blood' was included - essential but esoteric, its constituents known only to the alchemical fraternity. Here, just in case any reader wishes to attempt it himself, is Paracelsus's description of how to create a homunculus:

"Let the semen of a man putrefy by itself in a sealed cucurbite [glass vessel] with the highest putrefaction of the venter equinus [horse manure] for 40 days, or until it begins at last to live, move, and be agitated, which can easily be seen. After this time it will be in some degree like a human being, but, nevertheless, transparent and without body. If now, after this, it be every day nourished and fed cautiously and prudently with the arcanum of human blood, and kept for 40 weeks in the perpetual and equal heat of a venter equinus, it becomes, thenceforth, a true and living infant, having all the members of a child that is born from a woman, but much smaller. This we call a homunculus; and it should be afterwards educated with the greatest care and zeal, until it grows up and begins to display intelligence."

Equally obscure is 'animal tincture', listed in another medieval recipe.

The vaguely human-looking root of the mandragora or mandrake plant Mandragora officinarum inspired the false belief during medieval times that it could be utilised in the production of homunculi. During his body's last convulsive spasms before death, a hanged man will sometimes ejaculate semen, and it was said that where this fell to the ground, a mandrake would grow. If its anthropomorphic root was then pulled out before dawn on a Friday morning by a black dog, then washed, and nurtured with milk, honey, and sometimes human blood too, the root would subsequently develop into a homunculus, which would guard and protect its owner.

Mandrake with unrealistically humanoid root, depicted in Tacuinum Sanitatis, a 15th-Century manuscript

An even more exotic recipe for growing your own homunculus was cited during the 1700s by no less a figure of learning than Dr David Christianus from Germany's Giessen University. According to his claim, an egg should be taken from a black hen, and a tiny hole should be poked through its shell. A bean-sized portion of the albumen then needed to be removed and replaced by human semen, after which the egg's opening should be sealed with the hymen from a virgin maiden. Once this was accomplished, the egg must be buried in dung during the first day of the March lunar cycle. After 30 days, a homunculus should emerge from the egg, and as long as its owner provided it with a regular diet of earthworms and lavender seeds it would protect him and assist him in all of his endeavours.

Notwithstanding the inherent difficulties in obtaining the necessary ingredients and in performing the intricate series of processes required, records detailing the successful culturing of homunculi do exist. An extraordinary specimen grown from distilled human blood and able to emit beams of red light was reputedly cultured and exhibited at the court of France's King Louis XIV by royal physician Dr Pierre Borel.

Homunculi feature in many contemporary novels including Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee (1993), in which he portrays real-life Elizabethan magus John Dee successfully creating a homunculus

As fully documented in Dr Emil Besetzny's book Die Sphinx (1873), however, the most outstanding case must surely be the creation of ten living homunculi in a mere five weeks, accomplished in 1775 by two alchemists - Austrian noblemen Count Johann Ferdinand von Kufstein and Italian mystic/Rosicrucian cleric Abbé Geloni.

Like all homunculi, they were grown in sealed jars (homunculi die if exposed for any considerable period to the air), filled with water and eventually buried under heaps of manure. These were treated (as usual) with some special, but unspecified, solution, and doubled the size of eight of the homunculi, producing a series of 1-ft-tall specimens.

No two homunculi looked the same, and to each was fixed an identity. Eight were physical manikins, known respectively as the king, queen, knight, monk, nun, seraph, miner, and architect, and clothes pertinent to their identities were manufactured for them. Each of these eight homunculi was fed with special pink tablets every 3-4 days, and their water was changed once a week. On at least one occasion, the 'king' homunculus escaped from his jar, and was earnestly trying to remove the seal on the jar housing the 'queen' when he was spotted by Count Kufstein's butler, Klammerer. Chased by Kufstein and Klammerer, the 'king' soon fainted from exposure to the air, and was put back inside his own receptacle.

The remaining two homunculi were non-corporeal, and only appeared when Geloni tapped their jars and chanted certain magical words. A face would then materialise in each of them; moreover, in one the liquid would turn blue, in the other it would turn red. The red 'spirit' homunculus was fed on blood, and its water was changed every 2-3 days, but the blue 'spirit' homunculus was never fed and its water was never changed.

All ten homunculi would answer questions concerning future events, invariably predicting correctly the outcomes, and they were observed by many people. These included some very notable personages, like Count Franz Josef von Thun and Count Max Lamberg. Surely, however, such bizarre man-made entities could not really have existed - or could they?

I cannot help but wonder whether these particular homunculi were nothing more than large amphibians brought back by travellers from the tropics. One likely candidate is the African clawed toad Xenopus laevis, a common species vaguely humanoid in shape, which lives permanently in water - explaining why the 'king' fainted soon after escaping from its jar?

Homunculi – created from blood, or merely specimens of the African clawed toad (like this one)? (Michael Linnenbach/Wikipedia)

No-one knows what happened to nine of the homunculi after Geloni and Kufstein ultimately went their separate ways. However, an event occurred that may actually have left behind some tangible evidence of the tenth. Once, the jar containing the 'monk' homunculus was accidentally dropped, smashing as it hit the floor and killing its humanoid inhabitant. His body was afterwards buried in the grounds of Kufstein's Tyrolean residence - but where is this today? If only we knew its locality, the soil around it could be sifted, as suggested by Paul Thompson - and who knows what remains might be found?

One thing is certain. If a 12-in-long skeleton is ever found under these circumstances, Thompson would be very interested to learn more about it - and so would I.

A greatly-expanded, updated version of this article, emphasising its potential (crypto)zoological aspects, can be accessed here on my ShukerNature blog.


This article is extracted and expanded from the homunculus section of my book The Unexplained: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Natural and Paranormal Mysteries (Carlton: London, 1996)